May I be allowed a small gush? I adore Frank Gehry's new temporary Pavilion at the Serpentine. Crazy panels, crazy struts, crazy angles, and - like the frocks on Oscars night - no evident means of defying gravity. But what an exhilarating edifice. I only wish it had been given a punchier launch than this concert of modern chamber pieces, directed and mostly written by Thomas Adès.

On paper it looked like a marriage made in avant-garde heaven - Adès, the great hope of British music, inaugurating a space designed by Gehry, the architect of the most dazzling concert hall built in recent times (in Los Angeles rather than London, sadly). But Adès's chamber pieces, though fascinatingly intricate and wittily allusive, don't really work in an open-air pavilion with traffic growling 100 metres away.

At least the first, Catch, offered the visual diversion of a fine clarinettist, Matthew Hunt, meandering through the audience - playing a perpetual outsider trying to break into the charmed circle of Adès himself (on piano), Simon Blendis on violin and Louise Hopkins on cello. But I felt sorry for the Endellion String Quartet, who put so much effort into Adès's elegiac Arcadiana (a nostalgia trip through mythic musical landscapes, including a deconstruction of Elgar's Nimrod), only for all their subtleties to disappear in the breeze.

Hunt's performance of Steve Reich's minimalist classic, New York Counterpoint - where the clarinettist supplies a live 11th line of counterpoint to ten already recorded - was better suited to alfresco airing and to the playful riffs of Gehry's architecture. And here there was a 12th line too: a “London counterpoint” of sirens and double-deckers. More “Park Nights” of entertainment under Gehry's crazy awning until October.

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